Katherine Keenum

Website alert: The decorations on elaborate antique maps can often supply information or inspiration to fiction writers. For instance, in my current fantasy novella, there's a short passage involving a silver mine. The borders of Seutter's map of silver-mining in Saxony are full of exquisite details which supplied just the images I need. The map is found a great source, 18th century cartography, a section of World Revealed: Geography & Maps at the Library of Congress. Check it out!

Website alert: Pennsylvania German folk artist's Lewis Miller's sketch of Princeton, New Jersey, in September 1847 is taken from a National Gallery of Art project, a History of Early American Landscape Design. The website is a great resource for picturing settings. Besides allowing you to visualize Princeton as a surprisingly rural town, this particular image also suggests the device of keeping an illustrated journal—maybe by of your characters!

See the black nurse in a turban on the far right? In her award-winning catalogue for the exhibition, Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today (2018), curator Denise Murrell points out that the population of Paris in the 19thC was much more racially mixed than many people realize. She contrasts Manet's Children in the Tuileries Garden to Lobrichon's Promenade of a Paris Crèche on that very ground.

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This reconstruction of a Viking house in Schleswig is from an article on Open Hearths, Ovens and Fireplaces. Among other topics, it reviews studies in how much wood it takes to heat reconstructed Viking dwellings. Conclusion? No one could have lived in the famous long houses during the winter. They required far too many tons of fuel for medieval woodcutting technology to meet. In contrast much smaller houses, like the one here, are bearable—for modern graduate students, at any rate.

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When I saw the animal in last week's press coverage of Breathtaking new paintings found at Pompeii, my first thought was, "It's a dog." My second was, "No, it's a lion." And lion it is. Not only that, but the mural solves a scholarly question.

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Although Lilias Trotter studied informally with John Ruskin, she probably thought of herself primarily as a missionary, not as an artist. Yet no one can paint with her flair without its meaning a lot to her. In other words, like many multi-talented people with strong callings, Trotter was complex. Personally, I dislike fictionalized biographies. Secondary and walk-on parts for real people in historical fiction? Of course. But it takes chutzpah to pretend to "bring them to life" as central characters. Still, if discovering someone like Lilias Trotter prompts a wholly fictional character to emerge in my imagination and demand that her story to be told, won't I be grateful!

Image via James Gurney. For a website devoted to her, click here.

 
Blog post alert: This 1777 eye-witness sketch of camp followers is a reminder that women participate in wars whether military commanders want them to or not. Wives, cooks, laundresses, and prostitutes—for writers of historical fiction, they can provide more than local color. A story could be told from their point of view. Also, of course, consider the artists and photographers who record wars. In this case, what would it have been like to be Swiss-born artist and coin collector, Pierre Eugène du Simitiére, during the Revolutionary War?
 

Blog post alert: This brilliant Faroe Island sweater was knitted 217 years ago, dispatched from Copenhagen, seized in 1807 by the British Royal Navy, stored in the UK, and recently brought to light when the package it was in was finally opened. You can read about it in the blog post Pristine 200-year-old sweater found in impounded parcel.

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Aren't they cute, itty-bitties holding onto each other's skirts in the Tuileries Garden! And yet so many for only four adults to care for. This isn't your typical picture of a nanny and her charge. What's going on?

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